Ancient Landscapes

Sunday, 20 July 2014

We have used this easy technique many times.We designed it for public events where we would have to make a lot of rockpools with visitors in a short space of time but it is very versatile and you could adapt to suit your situation. While this was set up as an Ancient Landscape event you could of course make a modern rockpool, or perhaps a pond!

This activity guide uses the materials we used with notes about why we chose this or that

You will need

a dish - we used waxed card pie dishes (buy in packs from discount stores and supermarkets). Most of our dishes were white but the occasional blakc ones that we found worked well, too!

acrylic paint - to paint on the waxed card - we use large bottles but you could get some small tubes, or try mixing some poster or redimix paint with PVA glue and see if that works

paint brushes or sponges

Plastic plate to squirt the paint onto (easy to clean)

small sheets of card

coloured pens or pencils

sharp scissors

a small stapler (the smaller the better)

PVA glue

scraps of stuff: sponge, wool, carrier bag, felt, glitter, sand.....

some of our sources of ideas

Thinking about fossils

Our aim was to make a rockpool that you might have found if you could have gone walking along a Carboniferous seashore 300 million years ago. You might want to find pictures of some of the animals of the time to help you. Or maybe you have some fossils to look at? Or some plastic ancient sea creatures? Could you visit your local museum and do some drawings...Perhaps if you printed out this page and waved it at them, they would set up an event for all you ancient rockpoolers?

Prepare the pool

Cover your work surface with a sheet of paper - acylic paint can be hard to clean off. Cover yourself as well if you are a messy worker. You might want an old shirt rather than another sheet of paper

Select your rockpool colours: blue, green turquoise and raw ochre are often good. Smear them round the inside of your pool (paintbrush or painting sponge). You do not need to be too precise here. It is background and more a sense of sand, rock and water that is needed rather than detailed painting

Set of one side to dry

Prepare the wildlife

Ok,. Now it’s up to you......

In this pool we have:

drawings or a trilobite and an ammonite (should we have coloured these in?)

drawing of a horseshoe crab that has been cut, folded and stapled to give it a more 3-D effect

drawing of a coral

fragments of one of my painting sponges have given us some rock

green wool and a shredded green carrier bag have give us some seaweed

Fingertip coral: this is another technique - we’ll post a “How-to” guide to that in a week or so

a lively stand of fingertip coral

Fitting the wildlife

You could glue everything straight onto the dish, or make little brackets to lift things up off the floor and wall a little

Brackets might be small bits of foam or thin strips of card either folded or zig-zagged into a spring

Carefully glue them in place. A matchstick can be helpful in applying glue

Let it all dry, sit back and admire. Then go and tell someone about the day you found a trilobite.....or take and print a photo and send it as a postcard to someone else?

Thursday, 3 April 2014

As our project tides run out quietly, we thought we would
keep ideas and activities going out there in the wider ancient seas of everyone
else's lives.

We are going to produce several activity blogs to encourage
you to explore fossil worlds creatively!

Draw your own trilobite

This might seem silly but we've found this little activity a
useful one to encourage people to really look at and examine their fossils
closely. The pattern given here is for a very general trilobite. There are so many
different types that your personal one might be a very different shape. We
suggest trying this pattern to give you a good sense of trilobitedness and
confidence in your pencils. Then look at other trilobites and think about how
proportions change….

1. Draw a cross: if the main line is 3 units long, put the
crosspiece at 1 unit with arms of 1 unit each. Make a mark at the halfway point

2. Draw an oval using the tips of the cross as guide

3. Trilobite details

head: use the tips of cross-piece as guidesfor the curve of your trilobite's head
and that crosspiece or the half way point as a guide for the back edge of the
cephalon (trilobite head)

4. Draw in segments across the thorax - 10 is a good number
but on smaller drawings look crowded (exercise some artistic license). Look at
the symmetry and try to make that what you do on one side you also do on the
other

6. And just how colourful was a trilobite? Who knows? We do know that on our workshops, groups of Rainbow Trilobites often appear. The originals were probably - possibly - maybe - shades of grey or, like some modern crustaceans, they might have been reds and purples or coloured to suit their preferred habitats....

Trilobites in Derbyshire - were rare and fossils are even rarer! By the Carboniferous, the trilobites were fading away. After millions of years they were dwindling. If you really want to celebrate Trilobite richness, sink back still further in time and pay a visit to a Cambrian rockpool

Developments: try adjusting the intial cross to get a
trilobite from different angles. Once you feel confident with quick drawings of these trilobites start shifting the proportions to extend those side spines on the head (look at Fallotaspis and others)

that initial cross was tilted and the cross piece shifted off-centre

Fingerpuppet trilobites

These can start with either a drawing like the one above or
half a drawing, drawn onto a piece of folded card with the fold corresponding
to the main line of the cross

Cut it out, cut a line in from the edge to the side of the
eye (the longer the better usually). Fold the cephalon along this line, folding
front over the sides. Staple in place. This will pull the head into a nice
curve and the original fold will help shape the rest of the animal.

Add a ring of card to the underside, slide the puppet onto
your finger and off you go! (Why not make one for every finger and have a
family of them?)

Other trilobite models: the Australian Geological Survey Association do a lovely trilobite model printout. Australian trilobite model

Inspired by the fossils of Peak District limestone, join the our artists and make your own finger-puppet trilobites or a rockpool full of ancient animals or some ferocious fossil fish model

This event will be held among the exhibits of the Museum's White Peak/Dark Peak exhibition where you can find out more about our local geology and see how our dramatic landscapes have inspired artists over the centuries

Monday, 20 January 2014

The Ancient Landscape seabed is still cheerfully oozing (in a fluffy sort of way) in Buxton Museum and Art Gallery as part of the White Peak/Dark Peak exhibiton. if you are passing, please do drop in and stroke a seaweed

We have a public event on Tuesday 18th february: details will follow soon

you are advised to approach cautiously

a chair may offer good cover

...for a surreptitious approach

or you may loiter round a corner

the unsuspecting reef espied from behind a flipchart

triumph! a close encounter with with woolen wotsits!

but please beware of the guardian seasquirts: they have been known to swallow whole fingers

Saturday, 28 December 2013

A bit belated, but here are images from our Ancient Landscape activities at the Dove Valley Centre's delicious Apple Day but in October

We sent the AL artwork and artist) in as a reminder to visitors to look under their feet and to remember that the earth the fruit trees were growing in drew its form from the stony bones of the earth. And here those bones reflect the ancient seas of 300 million years ago….

Saturday, 21 December 2013

High Tide again

From December 14th to February 22nd 2014, our Ancient Landscape will be adding its own distinctive wooly touch to Buxton Museum and Art Gallery’s “White Peak, Dark Peak” exhibition

Celebrating the inspiration that the gritty Dark Peak and softer landscapes of the limestone White Peak have offered artists over the centuries, the exhibition features prints, paintings, finds and poems from the Museum collection. It includes several new pieces added to the collection during the Enlightenment! initiative.

Quietly loitering on one wall, is a poem by one of our own Ancient Landscape artists. Gordon MacLellan’s “The Hills are Waiting” is included as an invitation to visitors to step out and go exploring these dramatic landscapes for themselves.

Public events: we are planning a public event on Tuesday 18th February 2014 - more details to follow. There might be a weekend event as well...

Sunday, 29 September 2013

No, we're not fossilising apples nor pretending they are the first of the Carboniferous fruits! But thsi Apple Day falls from its tree deep in our ancient limestone landscape, just where muddy water shales meet the limestone of the lagoon floor

Add caption

So, our Ancient Landscape will be rippling itself around on this Apple Day to remind everyone of the geology under their orchard feet!

So come along and play with a trilobite or two!

And try some of the Apple Days activities as well:apple tasting and identificationapple recipesapple juicingorchard wildlife walkstechniques for pruning your own treesstorytellingand other fruitful delights!

Friends and exciting sites to visit

About Me

Stone and Water are a Buxton-based community group, finding creative ways of celebrating the people, wildlife and landscape of the High Peak and surrounding areas. Over the last 10 years, Stone and Water have organised or been part of the delights of "In Pursuit of Love and Passion", the Buxton lantern parade; "People, Plants and the Peaks", the annual Tiny! events in Buxton's Festival Fringe and the lantern workshops and procession for the Christmas Lights Switch-on